Sustainable architecture and urban design: a tool towards resilient built environment

Abstract

Simply understood as ‘seeking opportunities out of crises’, resilience seems to be a universal approach to cope with contemporary global challenges, such as changing climate, rapid urbanisation, loss of biodiversity, migrations, etc. As a majority of the current problems are of urban origin – i.e. they emerge in cities, where they also cause significant consequences on people, ecosystems and infrastructures, it is a city and its territorial sub-elements (district, neighbourhood, site, and building) that provide a prolific field for exploring the mechanisms towards resilient governance, planning and design. Under such an overarching agenda of urban resilience, in this paper, we focus on exploring the components of architectural and urban design as a tool for mitigating climate change. More precisely, as carbon dioxide emitted from the built environment is released into the atmosphere at an unprecedented rate, we explore the design patterns that help reduce CO2 emissions to finally lessen the vulnerability index of urban systems. Scrutinising the relationship between the climate change and construction industry, we elucidate the concepts like sustainable construction, green buildings, and design for climate, among others. Finally, through the assessment of the adaptive reuse project in London, this paper identifies strategies of sustainable architectural and urban design aimed at curbing the effects of climate change and helping increase urban resilience.